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User blog:321sleep/It's a Cookbook! (My thoughts on spoilers)
Warning! Spoilers! :-) Personally, I feel like the use of the Spoiler tag, to warn readers of revealed plot details, is up to the person posting the page (or updating it with new info). In theory, since every scene we post is a plot reveal of some sort, everything on the Wiki deserves a Spoiler tag. In fact, that is how some websites operate. Click on "plot summary" on IMDB and you will likely get a spoiler warning at the top of the page. Some movie discussion pages will also have Spoiler tags; others assume that you have watched the movie by now and so don't bother to warn you about anything. I generally consider the followng when thinking about spoiler tags: 1) How old and important is the work? Will knowing plot details of "Leap, My Lovely" really ruin your appreciation of 77 Sunset Strip , a rarely seen, case-of-the-week TV detective series that was cancelled more than fifty years ago? Probably not. On the other hand, a brand-new work like "Incredibles 2 " or even last year's "Get Out " are fresh enough that it is safe to assume that (1) many people have not seen it yet but (2) they really want to, and will. 2) How famous is the work? This is a tricky one, but the older a famous work gets, the more viewers it racks up, and the more "loose lips" it generates. For example, it's still possible to remain unspoiled about the plot of the most recent Avengers movie. At one time, that was also possible for "The Sixth Sense," but that is harder now because the movie has been out (and replayed over and over) for almost 20 years. "The Manchurian Candidate" came out 56 years ago, to the point where its plot about a brainwashed assassin has been copied, parodied, name-dropped, and even directly remade. It's hard to say that anyone watching it today would be "spoiled" at this point. 3) Does the work rely heavily on plot twists, to the point where it becomes the main focus of the work? Here you would find movies like "The Sixth Sense," episodes of "The Twilight Zone," and other works where the "plot twist" is usually the thing people most talk about when they refer to it in casual conversation. There's a lot of overlap, naturally. For example, certain episodes of "The Twilight Zone" rely heavily on a last-minute plot twist to end the story, but at the same time, the episodes have been around since the 1960s, and many of them have entered pop culture at this point, so is anyone going to be spoiled if they read about it? Finally, there's a school of thought that essentially places the responsibility of remaining spoiler free on the person wishing to be spoiler free. For example, commercials and "next week on" promos for the American TV series "24" often gave away important plot details, to the point where the normal shock value of something bad unexpectedly happening to a character was greatly reduced (you knew it was coming, even if you didn't know how it would work out). But ultimately, even in those early days of the Internet, it was generally up to the person wishing to remain spoiler free to turn the channel before the "next time on 24" promo came on, or when the FOX network aired a commercial for an upcoming episode, and to avoid Internet chatrooms and discussion pages about the show. With that in mind, if a person comes to this Wiki, which is dedicated to collecting scenes of hypnosis and mind control in media, see a page titled "Get Out," and clicks on it, knowing that they have not seen the movie but would like to some day soon, is it our fault for ruining the movie for them? Or should they know well enough to avoid clicking on that link in the first place? There's no easy answer to that, I suppose, but I tend to lean towards the latter. Category:Blog posts